Nov 15, 2011

I posted last week about how I dabble in the Blackhat SEO world. I mainly do this for my own personal knowledge on how search engines work, and how to improve my blog’s search engine results. The interesting thing about how these guys game the search system, you learn about how it all works. It’s kind of like hacking or modding in that way. When you pull the machine or the program apart to see how you can change, or manipulate it, you learn way more about how it was designed to work in the first place.

Anyway, back on topic, so one of the big time goals for SEO professionals in the past was to increase their website’s PageRank in Google. Other search engines have their own search mechanism’s, but Google’s always seemed be the best one to game, because it always provided the best results for your search. That’s why they are number one! If you had a good PageRank, then the rest of the search engines would pick up your site naturally.

Before I get any further, let’s look at what PageRank is. According to Wikipedia:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page[1] and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

Long story short, PageRank was a way Google rated your site based on the number of “backlinks” pointing at your site. One of the best, well known, ways of getting backlinks is by commenting on do-follow blogs. That’s where the spammers come in.

I decided to search around to see if I could find a free tool that would automatically go out, harvest do-follow blogs, and automatically post to them with minimal effort. It didn’t take me long at all. I found one that not only finds do-follow blogs, but it will analyze them to see if they have Captcha’s, if they allow commenting, and will even look at the site’s PageRank.

Not only that, but it will also auto-generate comments that look completely legit based on keywords you provide. Not only that, but it will spin the content of the comment so the comments look original. Did I mention that it’s completely free? It’s called Comment Blaster.

Here is a video demo from it’s creator:

I tested this thing out with my Autoblog's that I mentioned on Friday, and this tool seems to be the real deal. Most sites have moderation enabled, but the comments are so damn real looking, I don't see them as having a problem getting approved.

Also, this tool seems to target Wordpress blogs because of the way the user’s names auto-hotlink to the user’s website. If you want to stop a tool like this, I seriously recommend enabling Captcha, or an alternate commenting platform like Disqus or Intense Debate.

Do you dabble in the black arts of SEO? Know of other tools like this? Let us know in the comments.